Perseus Frees Andromeda

In Michael Rush’s book, New Media in Art, he defines the art that has developed out of the marriage of art and technology as the “Art of Time”. Early New Media artists like photographer Eadweard Muybridge endeavored to capture the element of time in his sequential photographs. Similarly, Warhol explored time as a medium in his Screen Tests.

The image I have posted, Perseus Frees Andromeda (1510) by Piero di Cosimo, is an example of how artists have struggled for centuries with addressing the element of time in works of art. This Renaissance painter, a contemporary of Leonardo di Vinci, uses a device called “continuous narrative”. This is a type of narrative that illustrates multiple scenes of a story within a single frame. The use of continuous narrative actually predates the Renaissance and can be seen on the roman sculpture, Trajan’s Column, and the medieval Bayeux tapestry.

Here, di Cosimo illustrates part of the story of the Greek myth of Perseus. In order to do so the hero, Perseus, appears in the image three times. First, he enters on the upper right, wearing Hermes winged sandals, and spots Andromeda tied to the rock. The translated Greek verse that describes this is so beautiful I feel compelled to post it here:

When Perseus her beheld, as marble he would deem her, but the breeze moved in her hair, and from her streaming eyes the warm tears fell. Her beauty so amazed his heart, unconscious captive of her charms, that almost his swift wings forgot to wave.

He lands and she tells him that Poseidon has commanded she be sacrificed to a horrible sea monster because her mother has insulted the Sea-Gods. Perseus waits with her and is pictured a second time on top of the monster as he kills it with Athena’s sword, which incidentally, he has just recently used to cut off the head of Medusa. Finally, he brings Andromeda to her parents, (pictured again doing so on the lower right hand side of the canvas) and asks for her hand in marriage, which they gladly gave. Perseus is not the only character to repeat. Andromeda is pictured twice, as well as the King and Queen and villagers who appear on the left, recoiling in fear, and again on the right, rejoicing.

So Piero di Cosimo successfully challenges the confines of the traditional canvas as containing a moment frozen in time, and delivers to us instead, a story as it unfolds in time.

-Jen Sutherland